Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Post Fear

Slurpy android.

We have a fairly workable post-production process now. We have a few editors who each can put in a few hours per week. We've never really calculated how many hours it takes to edit a feature. Probably something on the order of 250 hours? That's 250 hours of concentrated work though. And it doesn't include audio editing or visual effects done outside of the picture editing program. But we should be able to finish a picture edit in a couple months.
+++++
Being that I fear Apple's upgrade path in Final Cut Pro is to make it more impossible for professional video editors to use it, I've been re-checking-out Adobe's Premiere.
I've edited two features on Premiere. Apostasy was edited in version... 3? or so. I used a video card and imported the video onto this huge SCSI 9GB (!) hard drive I bought.
We had some difficult times editing Solar Vengeance with Premiere. Premiere hates it when you bring in libraries and libraries of stuff (like music) because it has to render previews of all that dang music. It makes opening a project take a loooooong time. And, for whatever reason, when we were doing the color correction in Premiere, the dang program would crash fairly regularly. I would get three edits in and then BAM! Crash.
But my biggest problem with Premiere is that it wouldn't export OMF files for us to use in audio editing and mixing. That issue has apparently been solved.
Right now Final Cut Pro 7 works for us. Who knows? Maybe we'll be using a frozen version of FCP 7 for the next ten years as Apple runs off with the amateur market.
But of course option number two is that Apple decides to put a secret switch in Final Cut Pro X v.5 called "I know what I'm doing, get out of my way" for professional editing facilities which lets us get our work done.
I'm very pleased that Premiere has (finally) included OMF export. And I'm glad it's a potential backup if we need to jump off the Final Cut Pro teat. ("Jump off the Final Cut Pro teat"? Grab your bull by the hand and don't mix your metaphors.)
But here's yet another issue: every lab we use can accept Final Cut Pro projects with flattened ProRes422 Quicktimes. Maybe this new version of FCP will convince labs and everyone else to go to an open - source wrapper and compression format.

3 comments:

joe said...

more titties!

Andrew Bellware said...

I'm not entirely sure how the new version of Final Cut Pro will help with that, but I'm willing to try! ;-)

Lindsay Stewart said...

i need to upgrade my machines before worrying too much about the software side. from what i've been reading, the most recent version of premiere, cs5.5, is much more stable. given a box with a mercury capable card, it should chew through huge projects with relative ease, not to mention all the dslr codecs being native. as for final cut ex, it looks a lot like the imovie interface on steroids. me no likey. i was forced to do a job in imovie (so the client's wife could make changes... shudder) and it was a retarded nightmare. a film strip mr jobs, you finally get around to applying the magical shiny miracle rub to the pro-editing wares and you give us a film strip interface? no wonder the BBC ditched apple and put premiere on all of their editing desks.